The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age

Summary

The astonishing story of America’s airwaves, the two friends—one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor—who made them available to us, and the government which figured out how to put a price on air.

This is the origin story of the airwaves—the foundational technology of the communications age—as told through the forty-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor.

David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio. Sarnoff was convinced that Armstrong’s inventions had the power to change the way societies communicated with each other forever. He would become a visionary captain of the media industry, even predicting the advent of the Internet.

In the mid-1930s, however, when Armstrong suspected Sarnoff of orchestrating a cadre of government officials to seize control of the FM airwaves, he committed suicide. Sarnoff had a very different view of who his friend’s enemies were.

Many corrupt politicians and corporations saw in Armstrong’s inventions the opportunity to commodify our most ubiquitous natural resource—the air. This early alliance between high tech and business set the precedent for countless legal and industrial battles over broadband and licensing bandwidth, many of which continue to influence policy and debate today.

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The Network - Scott Woolley

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The characters’ dialogue represents their exact words as captured by reliable contemporaneous recordings, including audiotapes, courtroom transcripts, and police wiretaps.

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

ACT I

INVISIBLE

Chapter 1 Armstrong

Chapter 2 Sarnoff

Chapter 3 Marconi

Chapter 4 Bride

ACT II

INVALUABLE

Chapter 5 Sarnoff

Chapter 6 Armstrong

Chapter 7 Sarnoff

Chapter 8 Hoover

Chapter 9 Sarnoff

Chapter 10 Armstrong

Chapter 11 McCormack

Chapter 12 Rogers

Chapter 13 Sarnoff

Chapter 14 Sarnoff

Chapter 15 Johnson

ACT III

INFINITE

Chapter 16 Sarnoff

Chapter 17 Paley

Epilogue McGowan

Photos Section

Acknowledgments

A Brief Discussion of Sources

An Extended Selection of Important Sources by Topic

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

ACT I

INVISIBLE

CHAPTER 1

ARMSTRONG

New York City—1954

EDWIN ARMSTRONG HAD HIS THIRTEENTH-FLOOR LUXURY apartment all to himself for the night, just as he had planned. His wife, Marion, was staying at her sister’s in Connecticut. He had surprised their live-in cook and two maids with an extra night off work. The world-famous inventor, Ivy League professor, and multimillionare placed his handwritten suicide note on the bedroom dresser and walked to the window. He slid it open, feeling a shock of freezing winter air wash over him.

The Armstrongs’ sprawling seventeen-room apartment was the sort of place most New Yorkers dreamed of living. Known as River House for its location on the western bank of the East River, the twenty-six-story art deco tower had been designed in the Roaring Twenties to cater to the top rung of Manhattan’s social ladder. Its other fifty-five apartments housed neighbors with last names like Roosevelt, Hearst, and Rockefeller. The Armstrong apartment, set at the midpoint of the building’s A line, offered one of River House’s signature views: a panoramic sweep from Brooklyn to Queens, across Roosevelt Island, and up the Manhattan skyline running north along the water’s edge. In past summers, the river had served as convenient parking spot for his neighbors’ yachts. Tonight, a fierce wind blew upriver, speckling the dark water with whitecaps.

To his fellow New Yorkers, the day just ended had been an ordinary Sunday—but to Major Armstrong it marked an important anniversary. Forty years ago, he had witnessed the full power of his first invention, a discovery that kicked off his career as the most prolific inventor since Thomas Edison.

On that long-ago January 31st, in 1914, a twenty-three-year-old Edwin Armstrong had embarked on an unusual adventure. Back then, the ability to send information through the air was little more than a parlor trick. Consumer radios had not yet been built, or even imagined. The only thing the airwaves were good for at the beginning of the twentieth century was zipping Morse code dots and dashes a few dozen miles—useful for communicating with ships at sea but little else. Armstrong believed he had invented a device that could change that, grabbing enervated airwaves drifting in from clear across the Atlantic and reinfusing them with enough power to make them detectable, a feat that wireless experts considered impossible.

That’s when David Sarnoff first entered the story. An acquaintance of Armstrong’s, Sarnoff shared the inventor’s youth and optimism, and was one of the few people to believe Armstrong’s idea might actually be possible. Since Sarnoff worked for a company that owned the world’s largest antenna, he offered to connect Armstrong’s device to the antenna and put his claims to the test. The results shocked even the two young optimists as they suddenly began to pick up wireless signals being sent from the far side of the planet.

From that day on, Armstrong and Sarnoff’s fascination with the untapped power of the invisible waves would bond them and set their lives on parallel paths. Armstrong’s imagination, talent, and luck continued to astound. Following the creation of his tool to make weak airwaves stronger, he built a device that made it easy for a radio transmitter to summon the invisible waves. He followed that with a breakthrough that allowed engineers to change an airwave’s length, multiplying their information-moving power once again. Invisible waves controlled by Armstrong’s discoveries would deliver the sound of Duke Ellington’s jazz to radio listeners, the sight of Jackie Gleason’s antics to TV viewers, and the location of incoming Nazi bombers to the Allied Air Command.

Like Thomas Edison, who kept working into his eighties, Major Armstrong had maintained his passion and creativity as he had aged. Twenty years after their trip to test out his first invention, Armstrong invited Sarnoff to his lab at Columbia University to show him yet another invention, FM radio.

EDWIN ARMSTRONG’S BIGGEST MISTAKE, as he now saw it, had been his naive assumption that the David Sarnoff who showed up for the FM radio demonstration, would be the same giddy engineer who had accompanied him twenty years earlier. He knew, of course, that his friend had used their shared faith in the airwaves’ expanding power to build a wildly successful career of his own, ascending to run the Radio Corporation of America, the world’s largest manufacturer of AM radios and other electronics, as well as the National Broadcasting Company, RCA’s most famous subsidiary and the world’s largest AM radio network. What Armstrong hadn’t expected was for David Sarnoff to betray their friendship and lead a secret cartel dedicated to crippling both FM radio and the infant television industry.

When Armstrong first turned his efforts to convincing the world of those explosive allegations, following the end of World War II, he knew it would be a challenge. By then, David Sarnoff was, in the American public’s eyes, famous, accomplished, and respected. Even so, Armstrong’s task of exposing the corruption and Sarnoff’s role in it hadn’t seemed so daunting at first. After all, the inventor had spent his life revealing invisible powers to an unbelieving public.

And yet, for reasons he still did not understand, nothing worked. Not the seventeen lawyers he hired to sue Sarnoff and RCA. Not the congressional investigations he instigated. Not the accusations he leveled in the popular and the scientific press. None of it ever seemed to matter.

Why had all of his efforts to expose the corruption of the American airwaves failed?

Who was the real David Sarnoff?

Those questions had obsessed the inventor for nearly a decade, his failure to answer them slowly poisoning his marriage, his career, his life. Now, as the biting wind blowing up the East River washed over him and flooded into the apartment, he considered his options. The blueprints for River House put the distance to the rooftop below him at 139 feet, 7 inches. More than enough for the job, the engineering professor could easily calculate, just by eyeballing the drop.

CHAPTER 2

SARNOFF

New York City—1906

A HEAD OF CURLY BROWN HAIR BOBBED ALONG IN THE RIVER OF older, taller men rushing to work in lower Manhattan. At Wall Street the main flow of commuters forked off in the direction of the New York Stock Exchange while the fifteen-year-old continued south, down a side street.

David Sarnoff made for an unusual sight, and he knew it. Fifteen was young to be starting a full-time job on Wall Street, and he looked closer to twelve, thanks to his stubby stature and the baby fat filling out his round face. Sarnoff hoped the formal business suit he wore was doing its job of disguising his youth, though from the glances of his fellow commuters it seemed possible that it was having the opposite effect, drawing attention to the comic contrast between his age and his attire.

Yet the teenager gave off an air of nonchalance. It was one of the immigrant’s peculiar talents: a knack for fitting in at whatever new world he found himself. Part of that gift was innate, a self-assurance rarely found in adults and invariably absent in undersized teenage boys. The other part of David Sarnoff’s easy adaptability could be traced to hard-won experience. Born in 1891, Sarnoff spent the first nine years of his life in an isolated Jewish village, speaking Russian and Yiddish. Then, one day, his family shipped out for Manhattan, where he had spent the last six years learning English and everything else he could about his new home.

Even as a nine-year-old unable to comprehend the language, Sarnoff was immediately entranced by turn-of-the-century New York. Its four million people. Its electric streetlights. Even New York’s clouds were exciting, thanks to local newspapers’ habit of using them as floating billboards upon which giant spotlights blinked out election results, sports scores, and other big news in Morse code. But to David Sarnoff the real difference between his old village and his new city was more fundamental. In the shtetl where he spent the last decade of the nineteenth century, much of it studying the Torah, his daily life was almost indistinguishable from that of his seventeenth-century ancestors. In twentieth-century New York, stumbling across the unimaginable became a regular and delightful part of David Sarnoff’s life.

His fellow commuters offered one example. When Sarnoff and his family arrived in 1900, he had been floored by the city’s extensive network of elevated steam trains and horse-drawn trolleys. Today, just six years later, he could see his fellow commuters materializing on Wall Street, delivered to the financial district by the new subway system that used electric power to whisk them underground and eliminate the soot and manure of aboveground transportation. Commuters could now travel from Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan to Wall Street in a mere twelve minutes.

To David Sarnoff, the subway’s nickel fare remained a luxury, especially on a sunny September morning like this one. From the Lower East Side tenement he shared with the rest of his immigrant family, it took about fifteen minutes to walk to Wall Street. Besides, what really fascinated the fifteen-year-old immigrant was not mankind’s newfound ability to move people beneath cities at the speed of a steam train, but its power to move information around the globe at the speed of light.

THE TEENAGER HAD HAPPENED UPON his new obsession at the end of another difficult path. Ever since arriving in New York, Sarnoff’s father, Abraham, had been incapacitated by tuberculosis. David helped support his family by rising before dawn to manage his own newsstand before heading off to school. His father’s death earlier this year ended his schooling, and made him the primary breadwinner for his mother, Leah, and two younger brothers. Having just completed eighth grade, Sarnoff declared his years of part-time work and full-time schooling over and began looking for a job.

After scouting around for a job as a newspaper copyboy, Sarnoff happened to stop by the headquarters of the Commercial Cable Company, which was hiring messenger boys. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the fifteen-year-old found himself in a dream job.

The Commercial, as the company was known, was arguably 1906 New York’s hottest high-technology company, if not the world’s. Founded by mining baron John Mackay, the company owned five of the sixteen undersea cables that sent telegrams beneath the Atlantic Ocean. The Commercial also ran one of the two new cables that crossed the Pacific, a ten-thousand-mile-long wire that could zip text messages from California to Japan, China, and the Philippines.

Each cable was an expensive feat of engineering, paid for with silver dug from Mackay’s mines in California and Nevada. The newest of the Commercial’s five Atlantic cables, built for a record $3.5 million, contained 1.4 million pounds of copper insulated with 800,000 pounds of sap from Malaysian perch trees. Another 17 million pounds of armoring made from a blend of brass, iron, and jute protected the very expensive wire from the dangers of the deep: sharp rocks on the ocean floor, ships’ anchors, and teeth of curious sharks attracted by the cable’s electrical current.

For the new messenger boy, the connections made possible by this ever-expanding worldwide web of cables held a special fascination. At the beginning of the last century, the entire planet had been as isolated as his old Russian village. If two people wanted to exchange information instantly, they needed to move close enough to see or hear each other. Moving information across or between continents meant moving physical objects, usually people or paper, at low speed and high cost. The resulting delays meant that distant continents frequently experienced major events in isolation, as natural disasters, wars, and other crises often began and ended before the rest of the world heard the news. Back-and-forth conversations between distant lands could take months, if not years.

The first hint that a faster form of communication might be possible came in 1822, when Danish physicist Christian Órsted hooked a copper wire to a battery and noticed something odd about a magnetized compass needle that sat nearby. French scientist Louis Pasteur summarized the importance of what happened next: He suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.

By the 1830s, thanks to the work of inventors led by William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and Samuel Morse, neighboring cities began using Órsted’s discovery to trade instant messages. A sender in one city would send an electric current down a telegraph wire, making a magnet move at the far end. By using a telegraph key to interrupt the current, the tempo of dots and dashes tapped out on the key would be mirrored by the movements of the distant magnet. It took another three decades of experimenting—and the genius of the great Victorian scientist Lord Kelvin—before the first transatlantic cable made it possible to jiggle a magnet on the other side of an ocean in 1858. The job of crossing the much wider Pacific Ocean proved far more challenging. David Sarnoff had been in New York for three years when the newspapers he sold announced that on July 4, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt had made history by sending himself a telegram that traveled clear around the earth.

In turn-of-the-century New York, David Sarnoff’s fascination with the growing global network was unusual only in its degree. To most ordinary people, the electrical transmission of intelligence was as close as modern science had come to discovering magic. Former secretary of state Edward Everett captured the general sense of awe after the first Atlantic cable carried an inaugural text message from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan: Does it not seem all but a miracle of art that the thoughts of living men—the thoughts that we think up here on the earth’s surface, in the cheerful light of day—about the markets and the exchanges, and the seasons, and the elections, and the treaties and the wars, and all the fond nothings of daily life, should clothe themselves with elemental sparks and shoot with fiery speed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere?

With every milestone, newspapers competed to express the general sense of wonder at the ever-expanding, worldwide web of cables. The magnitude of the subject transcends the power of language, the New York Times swooned after the first Atlantic cable went live. The Atlantic has dried up and we become in reality, as well as wish, one country, declared The Times (London). The public was equally euphoric. One celebration in Manhattan following the first telegram from Europe got so out of hand that much of city hall ended up in ashes. After President Roosevelt’s 1903 telegram made it around the earth, many commentators took a special glee in noting that twentieth-century science had outdone even William Shakespeare’s Puck, the magic fairy who brags of being able to circle the earth in forty minutes. Teddy’s telegram raced around the world three times that fast.

For David Sarnoff, an extrovert who grew up cut off from the world, working in the Commercial Cable Company’s office, connected to the far points of the globe, had felt like being admitted to the most magical building in the world’s most magical city. It also had magnified the pain and humiliation he felt three weeks before, when his boss fired him for taking a day off work on Rosh Hashanah.

Today marked the first day of his second chance to make it in the global communications business. Unlike the respected, profitable, and well-established Commercial Cable Company, his new employer had never posted a profit and many people on Wall Street suspected the company of being a front for an elaborate stock fraud. The fifteen-year-old Sarnoff had no way of independently evaluating that gossip. Besides, thrown out of the cable industry, for the moment he had no choice but to cast his lot with the rebels. Leaving the cool fall air behind, David Sarnoff walked inside and began introducing himself around the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America.

THE MARCONI COMPANY did have its believers. Optimists viewed the four-year-old company as a high-tech innovator, an upstart that had the potential to replace expensive wires under the sea with cheap waves in the air.

Though the company’s new office boy possessed no real scientific training, the gear he saw being used to send wireless messages remained rudimentary enough for him to quickly pick up a basic understanding of how it worked. The first scientist to shoot dots and dashes through the empty air (instead of a copper wire) had accomplished the feat in 1887, four years before David Sarnoff was born. At the time, Professor Heinrich Hertz, a German academic, had hoped to impress his fellow physicists by confirming a theory dreamed up by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. Using fancy mathematics, Maxwell had predicted the existence of invisible and intangible waves made from equal parts electricity and magnetism, but until Hertz came along, no one had been able to prove that Maxwell’s waves existed in the real world.

Hertz dreamed up a novel way to test the theory by mimicking a lightning bolt. While religion often attributed lightning to the divine (God’s burning finger, Herman Melville called it), Benjamin Franklin and other scientists studied it for clues to the true nature of electricity. Before Hertz’s experiments, one of lightning’s most intriguing and baffling powers was the way a bolt from the sky announced itself with a visible flash of lightning, an audible clap of thunder—and also in a third voice that almost always went unnoticed. Occasionally, lightning strikes caused metal objects to quiver or throw off tiny sparks at the exact moment lightning flashed in the distance. Professor Hertz saw this as a sign that the bolts were emitting the invisible electromagnetic waves Maxwell’s equations predicted.

To re-create the invisible, intangible waves in his lab, Hertz hooked up a simple device that fed electricity into a piece of metal until the charge leaped through the air to a nearby piece of metal in the form of a visible, airborne spark. These miniature lightning bolts did indeed release a burst of electromagnetic waves, which Hertz detected on the far side of his lab using a simple wire loop. (Hertz found that a circle of wire, with a small gap on one side, would emit its own much smaller spark every time the spark appeared on the far side of his lab.) While Hertz’s academic colleagues hailed his achievement, the rest of the world paid it no notice. As even Professor Hertz acknowledged, waves that no one could see or touch were obviously of no use whatsoever.

Fifteen years later, the wireless telegraph transmitters that David Sarnoff saw around the Marconi Company were more powerful but otherwise identical versions of Hertz’s original spark gap wave generator. The messenger boy watched as Marconi operators tapped out a message using a standard telegraph key, each touch summoning a spark in the air. To make dots and dashes the wireless operator would press the key in a staccato pattern, summoning a spark that disappeared almost instantly (a dot) or one that hung in the air a split second longer (a dash).

The equipment Sarnoff found the operators using to catch the waves represented a vast improvement over the wire loop Professor Hertz used as his original receiver. New magnetic detectors nicknamed Maggies took advantage of the basic relationship between electricity and magnets Hans Órsted discovered nearly a century earlier. An incoming electromagnetic wave would be caught on an antenna, producing a faint electrical current that moved a magnet. The Maggies did an excellent job of taking those tiny movements and using them to switch an audible signal off and on. A Marconi operator could sit with a pair